This comes from a comment on the last post. I don’t know who this Walter is. I suspect he’s the brother of “my” Michael, as he’s living in Lukane (Lackaun), which is the townland where Michael and his siblings were born. There is no way to prove that, though, at least not yet.

Confusing matters is the fact that there are two Walters who were born about the same time, in the same area. Cousins, maybe? One married Anne Kelly, emigrated to Stockport, England before the 1861 census, and died there in 1886. The other married Annie McFall and emigrated to New Zealand.

So which Walter took out the loan?

It’s also possible that both Walters, with wives named Anne/Annie, were living in the same area of Ireland, then the same area of England, at the same time. It could be Patrick and Mary Giles/Mary Scahill all over again!

I thought I’d blogged about that mess, but I can’t find the post. Maybe I dreamed it? The short story is that there were two Patrick Basquills who emigrated to England. One married Mary Giles, and the other Mary Scahill (sometimes spelled Cahill). If you are researching Patrick Basquills living in Stockport, England in the late 1800s, you need to be very careful. Otherwise you might find yourself conflating the families of Patrick the bricklayer and Patrick the hatter. Patrick the bricklayer married Mary Giles. Patrick the hatter married Mary Scahill. Patrick the bricklayer was the son of James Basquill and Mary Holland. I’m not sure who Patrick the hatter’s parents were, but most of the Ancestry trees I see him in have his parents as Patrick Basquill and Catherine Moore. I don’t think that’s correct, though, because as far as I can tell, their Patrick married a woman named Margaret Moore (strange coincidence, but they happen).

Anyway, it’s possible that some of the English census records I’d assumed belonged to Walter and Anne Kelly actually belong to Walter and Annie McFall. I need to look more closely at the information I have, to see if I can tell if there are shenanigans going on.